Why plumbers charge a call-out fee before they fix anything

Look up what a roof costs in British Columbia and you’ll find a range of $8,000 to $20,000 on one site, $13,000 to $40,000 on another, and a confident national average of $14,200 on a third. One of the sites publishing those figures says in its own small print that the numbers were generated by an AI from public data.

So the honest answer to "what does a new roof cost" is that nobody publishing an average knows what your roof costs, including us. What’s worth knowing is what moves the number, because that’s what lets you read three quotes and tell which one is actually cheaper.

Roofs are priced by the square, not the house

A roofing square is 100 square feet of roof surface. It’s the unit every roofer works in, and it isn’t the same as your floor area. A 2,000 square foot bungalow with a simple gable might have 22 squares. A 2,000 square foot house with dormers, a couple of valleys and a steep pitch might have 30.

That difference alone is thousands of dollars, and it’s why a neighbour’s quote tells you almost nothing.

Ask every roofer for the square count they measured. If two quotes disagree on the number of squares, one of them measured wrong, and that’s worth sorting out before you look at the price.

What sits inside the per-square price

Published per-square-foot figures for the Lower Mainland vary nearly twofold, which tells you how loosely they’re put together. The ordering, though, is consistent everywhere and is the useful part:

• asphalt shingles are the cheapest option and hold most of the market
• architectural shingles sit a step above, with a longer life
• metal runs roughly double asphalt, and lasts long enough that the comparison is not really about the first bill
• cedar and slate are higher again

Materials are usually less than half the total. Most of what you’re paying for is labour, and labour is where the quotes separate.

The four things that actually move your number

Tear-off. Stripping the old roof is real work and real disposal fees. Some quotes include it and some assume a layover on top of the existing shingles. Those are different jobs at different prices, and only one of them is legal on a roof that already has two layers.

Deck condition. Nobody knows what the plywood underneath looks like until the old roof is off. A quote that says nothing about rotten sheathing isn’t a fixed price, it’s a fixed price plus whatever they find.

Pitch and access. A steep roof is slower and needs more safety equipment. A house with no room for a truck and a chute costs more to strip.

Flashing, vents and gutters. These are the line items that quietly appear or disappear between quotes. A cheaper quote is often cheaper because it left them out.

If one quote is thousands lower than the other two, it’s usually not a better deal. It’s a different scope of work.

Making three quotes comparable

Ask all three for the same four things and the comparison does itself.

• the square count and the pitch they measured
• whether tear-off and disposal are included
• the rate per sheet for replacing rotten decking, in writing, before they start
• what happens to flashing, vents and gutters

The rain is the reason any of this matters

Vancouver gets around 161 days of measurable rain a year. Roofing here is water management before it’s anything else, which is why the flashing details and the underlayment are worth more attention than the shingle colour, and why a roof that was done cheaply tends to announce itself within a few winters rather than a few decades. Water that has already got into the walls is a different job under different rules, and worth reading about in does your contractor need a licence in BC.

Before you call anyone

Get three quotes. Read them for scope before you read them for price. And check the roofers near you on their reviews rather than their brochure.